As a parent, you want to give your child the best start in life. You want to teach them valuable skills for later in life and help them develop as people – coding can help achieve this. Below, we explore what coding is and why every parent should encourage their child to code.

What is coding?

Coding essentially refers to the instructions you give to a computer on how to operate. These step-by-step instructions can help us create software, games, apps and websites. Naturally, then, coders are the people who develop the programmes that computers run. As technology advances in our modern world, coding will become an increasingly important skill for anyone to learn.

At what stage can you start coding?

Coding is a complex skill, but you can actually start to learn it at a young age. Kids can start at around the age of five or six, with the fantastic STEM inventor kits or child’s coding apps such as CodeSpark Academy or Kodable. You’ll need to provide supervision and encouragement as your child learns how to code, but if they stick with it, they can enjoy plenty of benefits in the present and the future.

Academic performance

Every parent wants to help boost their child’s academic performance without putting them under too much pressure. Fortunately, learning coding can be a fun setting for this. Coding helps your child develop many different academic skills from mathematics to writing and creativity. By mastering complex coding, your child might also develop the confidence to tackle other tricky academic matters in a logical manner.

Writing and creativity

When your child learns to code, they’ll soon realise that there isn’t one set way to write the instructions for a computer. There are many different ways of achieving their goal. By analysing the different options available, your child can develop the application of their writing skills. Similarly, it can boost your child’s creativity. They’ll have to imagine the programme they want to create before actualising it – coding is the perfect sandbox to learn this skill.

Coding is the language of the world

Software touches almost everyone in the world. In the future, it’s thought that many jobs will require at least some basic computational thinking. By encouraging your child to learn to code, they’ll be more connected to the world, and they’ll stand a better chance of getting their dream job in the future.

Learning to code can seem like a daunting task. But your child can actually start this journey at a young age and make real progress towards unlocking the many benefits this skill offers.